Republicans Want to Defund Local Police to Fuel Trump’s Immigration Crackdown: Raskin Says

Mr. Chairman, greetings to all of our witnesses and greetings to all of the sheriffs who've come from the free state today. President Trump, whose approval rating has now fallen below 33%, promised us that they were going to repair the broken immigration system and make us safer by pursuing the worst of the worst. But his masked paramilitary squads bloated with tens of billions of dollars in tax money are attacking and killing ordinary people. American citizens, lawful permanent residents, and undocumented people who have no criminal records and no arrests. Rogue agents are terrorizing communities across America, shooting down US citizens at point blank range in broad daylight just for exercising their First Amendment and Second Amendment rights. Since Trump returned to office, immigration officers have shot at least 22 people, killing six of them, including three US citizens, Renee Good, Alex Preddy, and Ruben Ray Martinez. I was visited by a former detective in Maryland who retired after more than 20 years in office, who told me that he drew his firearm once and made a warning shot in his entire career. But you have people getting trained for a few weeks by ICE who get out and start pulling their guns on people and shooting within several weeks of being on the street. Instead of targeting criminals, ICE has pounced on parents in the school pickup lane, arrested people at daycare centers and in churches, thrown tear gas outside elementary schools and under cars with children seated inside, smashed the windows of cars and dragged the passengers out. Arrested students for writing op-eds and held US citizens against their will in immigration detention without bothering for days to verify their citizenship status. And that happened to one of my constituents. Just last month in Texas, a five-year-old child was detained with his father while on their way to a soccer game. They're beating people up. They're no longer going after the worst of the worst. They're acting like the worst of the worst. They've taken a further step into the darkness, even as our country's in war. As American service members fight and die in Donald Trump's illegal, unconstitutional, aimless, endless war of choice in Iran, ICE has decided to deport the spouses of US soldiers and indeed entire American military families. Last month, the wife of an active duty US citizen army sergeant, the mother of a six-year-old daughter, was deported after she was detained outside of a Walmart in front of her terrified daughter. In another heartbreaking story, the immigrant father of a sailor serving on the USS Abraham Lincoln was detained. His son had been deployed under stifling and miserable conditions on the Abraham Lincoln in the Middle East for nine months. And his father was anxiously waiting for him to come home when immigration authorities detained him. Only after a massive community outcry was the elderly father released. Under this administration, more than 50 parents and spouses of active duty service members have been detained by ICE and DHS. As the national debt soars over $40 trillion, one quarter of it coming from the wild spending of one president, Donald Trump. Our mega colleagues have provided the Department of Homeland Security with more than $240 billion for immigration enforcement. In this Congress alone, the agency has hundreds of thousands of employees, and 80,000 sworn law enforcement officers. More than the number of officers in Washington, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Las Vegas, and Dallas combined. Yet because ICE refuses to focus on the worst of the worst, despite these unprecedented and staggering resources taken from the taxpayers, ICE is failing at its duty to keep us safe. In June of this year, a Republican witness, a county sheriff, testified that his office notified ICE on eight different occasions that individuals were in its custody and available for pickup by ICE. Despite its gargantuan budget, ICE completely failed to respond in two of those eight cases, or 25%, resulting in two felony offenders being released into the community. That was testimony in this committee, but that's actually much better than Loudoun County, Virginia generally. In Loudoun County generally, ICE issued detainers for 419 people, but ICE only picked up 253. That means 166 of them were never even picked up by ICE. 40% of them weren't picked up by ICE, and that's the crux of their whole complaint here. Instead of trying to conduct oversight of DHS and demand accountability for this catastrophic and colossal waste of public resources, the administration and our colleagues keep throwing more money at the problem. For example, the administration has diverted over 28,000 officers from their law enforcement roles to work on civil immigration enforcement instead. A few weeks ago, the DHS Inspector General, a Trump appointee, released a report detailing how badly this monomaniacal focus on immigration was undermining our fight against opioids. Federal agents are spending 30% less time working on fentanyl cases. And as a result, fentanyl seizures have dropped more than 40%. That means more opioids getting into our country, onto our streets, and into our bodies, so they can have ICE officers picking people up in the kindergarten drop-off lane. Judiciary Republicans' solution this week is to rededicate themselves to this failed strategy. They passed a bill to force underfunded state and local jurisdictions to use more of their funds and resources to do the bloated federal government's job of immigration enforcement. That means cities and localities would have fewer officers, less money, and fewer resources to protect their communities from violent crime, guns, drugs, and drunk driving. What's worse, our colleagues have proposed defunding police departments across America in any jurisdiction that decides that state and local governments, and not ICE, should get to decide how state and local police departments are governed and run. Even the Speaker and the rest of the GOP majority are refusing to endorse and advance this defund the police anti-sanctuary city bill. Here in judiciary, we've already debated and voted on this defund the police bill. Republicans passed it out of this committee in March of this year, six months ago. The legislation that all of this is about has already passed out of our committee. Yet for the last six months, the Speaker has refused to put their bill on the floor. It seems even the Speaker realizes that after Trump's poll numbers have sunk like a stone, and the majority of Americans reject their authoritarian police state tactics, it's just bad politics and terrible policy to bring this bill out. Republicans on our committee have voted to strip protections for military families with pending green card applications. They voted against requiring ICE officers to wear body-worn cameras. They voted to strip children, including toddlers who are in the US without a parent, of their right to have an attorney even represent them in immigration proceedings. And they've refused to conduct any probe into the hundreds of millions of dollars DHS has squandered on private luxury jets, complete with bedrooms and bars, and glamorous photo shoots on horseback for Christy Noem, the prior secretary of DHS. Our colleagues keep holding these hearings because they want the public to believe that they somehow have policies backstage that they haven't unveiled yet that they will reveal in the next Congress to make it safer, but they don't. Their policies are so divisive, so toxic, so purely symbolic and off point that even Speaker Johnson won't put them on the floor. It's not fair to keep running the same hearing over and over again, to keep bringing the same witnesses back again for legislation which this committee has already passed, but which the leadership refuses to bring to the floor. In the ordinary legislative process, you have hearings so you can pass legislation out and advance it in the process. Here, our colleagues have totally turned it upside down. They've introduced a bill just so they can keep having hearings, but they're not doing anything with their bill. I wanna thank our witnesses for being here today. I would especially like to thank Ms. Fox, Mr. Coleman, your stories need to be heard by America. And you deserve a national nonpartisan audience for your story, and you deserve justice. I'm terribly sorry for what you and your families have been put through and continue to go through every single day. I hope that your daughters, Delilah and Carissa, draw strength from your fierce and passionate advocacy on their behalf. You and the American people deserve better than today's hearing, which is just running the same play over and over again. You deserve more than empty promises. We all deserve an America where our children are safe, where law enforcement officials around the country are focused on actually protecting our communities and not meeting quotas imposed by Stephen Miller or some other ideologue. You deserve, we all deserve a Congress that will finally repair a broken and cruel immigration system with comprehensive common sense immigration reform. I yield back, Mr. Chairman.